Want to tweak your monitor's settings without having to use its slow, inefficient menus? These two Windows apps will help you tweak your display right from your desktop.

I recently moved into a new apartment with a lot more light in the office—which means I need my screen to be brighter during the day, and dimmer at night. Instead of fiddling with my monitor's settings twice a day—a process that is pretty painful—I found two apps that can handle it much quicker.

ScreenBright is a simple app that doesn't require any installation. Just download it, start it up, and move the brightness, contrast, and color sliders to your heart's content. They'll adjust your monitor's settings without the need for its built-in menus.

Display Tuner is much cooler, but didn't work on every display in our tests. After installing Display Tuner, you can tweak the brightness, contrast, color audio, and other settings, and even set up profiles that you can activate with a hotkey. That means you could set your brightness high in the morning and low in the evening with one keyboard shortcut, which is great for those of us that have a lot of light in the office.

According to each app, your monitor has to support DDC/CI for them to work, though that doesn't necessarily guarantee that they'll work (our DDC/CI-compatible monitor still had trouble with Display Tuner). If your monitor does support DDC/CI, which you can find in its menus, give them both a try to see which one works for you.